Storage for Lab Manager

My client needs storage for Lab Manager running on 100 servers. Is it recommended to use the NAS or SAN for Lab Manager running and what type of e/s that you wait for the same thing?

I did a little bit with storage of LM in recent years.

I have a development/test environment on LM 600 machine, using 2 Sun 7210 storage devices (is no longer available) on NFS shares. We have 2 links 1 G servile vmKernel traffc as well as links to more vmnetwork, management, etc.  The devices are related to links of 4 x 1 G each.

I don't know what are the current constraints of LM/ESX, but whenever we revisit the decision 'block vs NAS' we end up selecting NFS (our Sun boxes can present the iSCSI as easily).

As Jon says, what storage you need certainly depend on your VMS and load.  NOTE: my experience is * NOT * in a production environment, where I am squeezing virtual machines performance.  It's more about the functionality and "adequate" performance (where "adequate" is a measure based on the user experience topic).

Some things we have learned over the years:

  • IOPS / s are kings, and most of them are entries.  (Written at the moment, I have a few heavy ready operations push me down to about 65 percent.)  I saw > 80% of entries maintained for days.)
  • Latency does not seem as important - VMs run about the same at 10ms latency and latency 250ms NFS NFS.  When latencies above 750ms grows, they will be noticiable users and if they go more than a second over 1000 ms you will begin to see the impact on the guest OSes, especially Solaris x 86.
  • Normal operations don't care about bandwidth - just current execution machines don't even fill a link 1 G
  • Deployment operations * could * start filling to the top of the bandwidth, maybe
  • Betware storm IO.  Often people think the storm IO deployment/boot, but 400 RedHat machines all the kickoff of their 'updatedb' cron job at 04:00 can produce any IO storm as well.  NOTE: IMHO if you buy storage to handle this kind of thing, you're overpaying storage.  I've spread my cron through the night and now can not see on the graphs of storage performance.
  • There is * NOT * a good correlation between guest OS IOPS / s as shown, for example, iostat and PAHO are / s NFS presented to the storage system.  I'm guessing that ESX made a lot of caching.

Most storage vendors I spoke last year does not seem to find it.  They think in terms of bandwdith and it accelerates with read cache, so unimportant in my environment - I had to push really hard to get sellers to think in the right conditions and some of them really seem out of their depth there.

I think that this state of mind is important: consider the IOPS / s as you consider CPU: how much should I give to each machine?  How much should I oversubsubscribe?

Like CPU, a physical machine which IO a lot more available that he needs and you can consolidate - but don't know how.  A physical machine with a pair of 15 k drives RAID1 has about 200 IOPS / s available and readers spend most of time inactive (a bit like the CPU).

That will boost the machines and when?  Right now I'm on average 9 inputs/outputs by VM, which in my opinion is quite small.  My storage system can go higher under request, but I have enough machines that it is fairly constant.

In my quest for the perfect storage of LM, I found the usual: good, not expensive or fast, you can choose any two.  How we use LM (lots and lots of shared models) we would really like a unique namespace shared (i.e. 1 data store). I have yet to find the 'perfect' - storage, the Suns are very profitable for the performance and space, but their management takes too much of my time and my 72XX are not expandable - the 74 might be a different experience.  I am currently looking to add some SSD storage, but the ideal configuration would be automated migratino between levels (for example, EMC QUICKLY) and if I bought only from EMC I would triple my cost per VM.

I talked to people who have a pattern of use of different models that are quite happy on several data stores.  If you can move your load through many warehouses of data then Isilon looks like interesting storage.

So, in summary:

  • Watch IOPS / s 1st, 2nd and 3rd, then the latency time, then (maybe) bandwidth
  • Manage the budget or the ability of the IOPS / s as you CPU
  • You may not use comments IOPS / s to provide shared storage IOPS / s

I'm hoping to have a better storage solution in the next 6 months or more.

--

Dewey

Tags: VMware

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